if (SOUND), then (FURY)
by WC Pemm
Summary: It was currently forward or nowhere, whether or not the floor was dropping out from under them with alarming frequency. Chell didn't mind, really. The crash of shrieking, twisting metal and the resulting scrape and clatter as it fell into the yawning abyss all covered up the Sound.
1. you'll have to break me open

**1. you'll have to break me open to hear anything**

* * *

"AHH! I, I-I-I think, uh, if I could offer just a bit of friendly advice here, suggestion really, proposal, could you, uh, could you maybe _not_ do that again? Ever again? Because that last bit, don't know if you saw it, understandable if you didn't, but those last few jumps did, kind of, result in the floor there sort of _collapsing_—"

The catwalk shuddered with every step Chell took. Her boots echoed in the the pipes and wires that strung themselves through the panel-backs and rusting walls, a hollow, haunting sort of sound. It mixed poorly with Wheatley's agitated voice, banging up through his constant commas. Being agitated, she had discovered, made him talk even more, which in turn ratcheted up how simple she found it to tune him out. At this point, it was crashing into one ear and out the other as quickly as it came.

"—and anyway I'm wondering if you might, say, be able to slow down a bit? It's really sort of, ah, unnerving up here, without a rail, just, just kind of hovering in space really—"

Too bad for Wheatley. It was currently forward or nowhere, whether or not the floor was dropping out from under them with alarming frequency.

Chell didn't mind, really. The crash of shrieking, twisting metal and the resulting scrape and clatter as it fell into the yawning abyss all covered up the Sound.

All around her, the Facility hummed. It pulsed, droned—it made a noise all its own, a Sound, that got into her very marrow, inside her _teeth_. Like chewing tinfoil. Time had dulled it, yes, and exposure, and the intense, blackout tunnel vision that blinkered her to everything else when it was time to act. But it never completely faded away, and there was nothing else to listen to.

"—I'm only saying, you know, _reminding_ you, that falling to our deaths is not quite what we're trying to accomplish here! Really counter-productive, actually!"

(Well, almost nothing.)

Chell rounded a corner, and a vivid thread of scarlet blinked across her vision before tightening its focus onto her forehead. In the grip of the portal gun, Wheatley yelped as she threw herself backwards, making the aging catwalk rattle ominously. She pressed herself against the railing, waiting, trying to force her heartrate down. The light kept staring past the corner, blinking gently. She couldn't remember—had she ever seen one blink before?

(The Facility vibrated gently under her, around her, leeching through the metal her hand was wrapped around and into her bones. She shifted her weight, heavily, letting the platform shudder and echo. Standing still made it worse.)

"_Hello?_" said a sweet, childish voice. Chell flinched at the familiar sound, an instinct by now. That was a lesson ground into her by the jagged, round scars on her legs and arms, by the clumsy makeshift stitches threaded through her sides time and again in the secret rooms. "_Excuse me? Is anyone there?_"

The Sound was getting louder the longer she stood still. It rushed in her ears. It pulled at her. Her legs twitched, desperate to move, run, escape it, find somewhere that dulled the horrible noise. Her eyes cut to Wheatley, and she found him silent, peering around the corner (as well as a sphere on the end of a gun could peer, anyway).

"I—I think it's safe, actually. Yes, yes, definitely, it's inside a tube. Brilliant, wonderful, perfect, all-clear—"

She had already started moving the moment he'd said _safe_, despite her better instincts on trusting Wheatley with anything. Ducking around the corner, she discovered he was actually right. The flickering red eye belonged to a turret sandwiched uncomfortably between a sorry-looking cube and half a panel, looking out at them from behind one of the glass tubes that ran the length of the catwalk and beyond. Chell didn't relax; there wasn't anywhere you really could relax, not _here_—but she did exhale, a little puff of air that could have been translated as relief.

"_Hello_," said the turret again, hopefully.

Wheatley hissed in discomfort, and through some small miracle his voice dropped. "Oh, grand. One of these. Don't make eye contact, whatever you do, keep going. Uh! Yes, hello! And good-bye! We've got places to be, sorry, can't stop, simply no time, hup-hup, _that means go_."

Chell had already started back down the catwalk. The turret made a high, unhappy noise which she was completely prepared to ignore, followed by:

"_Wait! I'm different!_"

Startled, Chell stopped. Wheatley squawked, sputtered like a bad engine, and revved right back into automatic.

"Uh, psst, don't know if you're aware, but you've, haha, you've actually stopped moving. Doing that thing with your legs. Forward motion, self-propelling, w—what's that word, wok? Walk? That's it, that's the one, you've stopped walking, which, I think, is maybe not the greatest idea, again, like the jumping—"

She took two steps backwards ("What're you doing?! Oh, now you're just being contrary!"), turning to to study the turret. It looked back at her with its blinking laser sight. "_Hello,_" it said again, and added, "_Thank you._"

"—as I was saying then, just, just need you to turn around, get back putting one foot in front of the other, can't be too hard with those fancy things on your legs, right? Good look, that, in my own opinion, nice and functional—very efficient, I'm sure. Not, not that I know much about walking, haha, not my department really, _just_ a bit—"

"_I'm scared,_" the turret said, shifting its legs a few degrees. Rubble crumbled around it. "_Take me with you…_"

An unpleasant pang of empathy cut through her. It was like a flash of far-off lightning, more startling than anything else. It took her a moment to gather her wits back about her. Kinship with anything in this place wasn't exactly a familiar feeling.

The turret said nothing else, watching her, and Wheatley's voice had been overridden by the Sound. It was burrowing into her worse than ever, but as much as she wanted to turn and sprint down the walkway, rattle the railings til the clamor and vibrations drowned It out …

There was nothing she could do. She lay her hand on the glass, easily two inches thick, and shook her head.

The turret's beam flitted down to her hand, the red light dancing over her fingers. Then it seemed to sigh. "_Oh,_" it said at last. "_I see. Thank you anyway. Good-bye._"

Its red optic flared, then dimmed until it faded entirely. Chell bit her tongue. She stood there a few more seconds, listening to Wheatley, until she realized he wasn't talking.

She looked down at the gun. Wheatley was looking back at her, somehow managing to come off as both anxious and concerned with his single glowing optic. His babble had trailed off.

"…Nothing to be done," he offered weakly. "Stuck, wasn't it? Better to ignore it."

The moment he said it the Sound roared back to life, front and center. It drowned out everything else, her own breathing, her own pulse. Her hand tightened against the glass, her ragged nails clawing into the smooth surface. Beneath her palm the turret lay still, trapped and helpless.

Seconds passed. The Sound did not change. She did. She felt her defenses rising again, the stark single-mindedness that kept her alive choking out the flickers of emotion that had pulled at her heart just a few minutes ago.

The Sound did not change, but for now she did not hear it.

With a motion as smooth, mechanical, and iron-plated as everything else she did, Chell turned and walked down the catwalk.

All around her, the Sound carried on.


	2. the bluebirds flutter in my chest

**2. the bluebirds flutter in my chest**

* * *

Night in Aperture. "Night," separate from "day" only by when Chell's body would fail her, when she slunk into the secret corners behind the fallen panels heavy with exhaustion, bruised and bleeding, to sleep.

Sleep, that was something Wheatley didn't quite understand. Why did humans run out of energy after just a few hours? Why did sitting down and going still and silent for even fewer let them start functioning again? It all seemed very inefficient. And they needed darkness to do it, too, and quiet! It was never silent in the Facility. The low, constant drone of a thousand different processes keeping the place functioning was always there—well, functioning as much as Aperture _did_ anymore. Beyond that only came the distant crashes as unmaintained machinery fell to pieces, the sounds of fans kicking up and winding down. Sometimes the calls of animals that had crept in from above would echo around them, strange and forlorn. Chell always slept poorly, jostled awake by the lightest thing.

They were always the same kind of noise, though: the far-off booms of the deteriorating labs, or the animals, or the Sound that was as familiar and comforting to Wheatley as his management rail. So when one night his aural receptors picked up a soft noise floating up through the walls he now hid behind, something he had never heard before, he took notice.

"Hey—hey, do, d'you hear that?" he said in a low voice, peering out through a shattered panel into the dingy, abandoned room Chell had holed up in between tests. From where his rail allowed him passage he could just scarcely see her, a shadowy figure with back pressed to a far corner. On the walls above her plant life crept in from God-knew-where, edging along the floor and curling in spirals over chairs and guard rails. Dead leaves covered the dented office desks and fallen filing cabinets that she had pulled into a semicircle around her. He wasn't quite sure why she'd bothered with that, really. It wasn't as if there was anything to protect herself from, not as if, say, werewolves stalked the belly of the Facility—or perhaps they did? Perhaps she knew something he didn't. That had to be it, because otherwise what was she trying to hide from?

Wheatley squinted, trying to pick out the source of the sound. Chell still slept; he raised his voice a few decibels. "_Psst, _hey, seriously though, listen—_listen_ to _that_, do you hear that? Though, you know, actually, perhaps you don't, how well do humans hear? Me, I can hear a, a wire sparking a good mile off, personally, but … hang on, just a minute, is that … is that _singing?"_

He fell quiet, finally, and listened.

The sound was hardly anything at all, breathy and half-there. It would wane and waver, only to rise again a few seconds later, all muted mumbles and murmurs. Straining, he caught a few syllables:

_someday I'll … on a star …  
_ _… wake up where the clouds are far behind … me …_

Wheatley cast about fruitlessly for the source of it. "Yes, I—that is singing, that is definitely, definitely music, musical, lyrical. That's, that's unprecedented, that is, back here in the, well, the middle of nowhere really isn't it? You've got to hear that, where on earth d'you think that's coming from? It's, it's a bit dark in here, isn't it, though, rather pitch, a bit—let me just—"

One fuzzy electric buzz later and he'd gotten his flashlight turned on. Swollen shadows lurched about the room as he shined it in the corners, on vents and grates. "I'm, ah, I'm not seeing anything. Do you see anything down there? I'm not, I mean I haven't got _exactly_ the best vantage point here, not really, sort of stuck behind the wall as it were—"

As he said it, he turned the light on her. She didn't move or open her eyes, not at first. She still slept, and Wheatley stared at her faintly-moving lips in a shocked silence. The song was coming from her.

It wasn't much, even now, barely audible and tuneless. The last few words touched the air and melted away:

"… _birds fly over the rainbow … why, oh why … can't …"_

Something boomed far off in the distance of the Facility, and Chell jolted awake. She sat up, squinting in the beam of his flashlight, and had Wheatley feet he would have tripped over himself to turn it off. The sense he had witnessed something he shouldn't have was creeping over him, dense and heavy. "H, hello!" he called, easing a bit backwards on his rail. She looked up at him, brow knit. "Uh, sleep, slept well, I hope? Just, you know, just checking up on you, of course, watching—_monitoring_ you, not watching really, whole different animal. Strictly professional. Wouldn't do if you, um, if you, I don't know, there's probably something bad that can happen to humans when they sleep, right? Sleep, sleepwalking maybe? Sleep testing? Wouldn't do, wouldn't do at all, bet you anything that's why so many of the other test subjects died—testing in their sleep …"

He trailed off, and scooted a few more inches down the rail until he could just barely see her staring up at him from her makeshift bed. "But, good news! You're alive! I'm alive! We're all alive, uh, though really that means She's alive too, that's, hahaha, that's not the best news, I suppose. But you're not sleep testing. No fear there, in, in case that's something you were worried about. … um. I'll just go then, shall I?"

Chell said nothing.


End file.
